ll California schoolchildren are required to take a year of California state history. The curriculum always includes, as it should, an examination of the turbulent 1850s, when 250,000 Americans converged on Northern California’s rivers and valleys in search of gold. The children learn that three billion dollars of the precious mineral were extracted and that many of those who mined it became rich.

We doubt that any California schoolchild ever learns that in the single year of 1950, California’s oil wells produced more in dollar value than the entire output of all of the state’s gold mines since John Marshall found the shiny nugget at Sutter’s Mill.

We wonder if any California schoolchild ever learns or any public school teacher even knows that oil money literally built the state of California.

The truth is that oil has always been part of California’s history. The coastal Indians used it for generations to waterproof their baskets and caulk their canoes, sometimes trading it to remote tribes. California’s first settlers gathered the tar, or “brea,” that seeped naturally in pools and open pits to grease their wagon wheels and fuel their lamps.

By 1899, Ed Doheny and others had developed more than 3,000 oil wells in a narrow tract of land west of downtown Los Angeles. Geophysicists later determined that Los Angeles possessed a subterranean oil lake 46 miles across and 22 miles long. It eventually produced three and a half billion barrels of oil.

Lyman Stewart and his son, William, put together Union Oil Company during those years and moved its operations out of Los Angeles and into the Santa Maria, Lompoc and San Joaquin valleys.

The strange movie, “There Will Be Blood,” seems to have been (very loosely) based on the lives of petroleum entrepreneurs like Doheny and the Stewarts.

Revenues from oil leases on state lands financed a substantial portion of the state budget through the 1960s. The oil industry itself produced and still sustains thousands of jobs statewide.

Now Gov. Schwarzenegger, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other “decision makers,” all of whom drive cars and fly in airplanes, have decided that fossil fuels are somehow sinister, and that no oil drilling should be permitted offshore or along the state’s tidelands.
Maybe they need a refresher course in California history.